The Island of Lost Maps

by Miles Harvey

  It must have seemed to him just then that there was no way out. He had been caught red-handed with stolen maps, sliced from one of the books he was known to have examined earlier in the day, a 1763 work entitled The General History of the Late War. A reliable witness had seen the crime take place, and fingerprint and handwriting evidence would almost certainly further tie him to the scene. The winds of doom now seemed to be blasting through that library, swirling and shrieking. And then, just as it seemed they would lift him off his feet and batter him away to some horrible fate, they suddenly ceased their rage. A calm returned to the room. The police were talking about letting him go.

  In his desperation Bland had offered to pay the library—on the spot and in cash—to repair the damaged books, and the cops seemed to think it was a pretty good deal. They had more important things to worry about than Gilbert Bland. Murders had risen nearly 9 percent in the city and its surrounding counties in the first nine months of 1995, compared with the same period of the previous year.3 Robbery, aggravated assault, and other crime categories were also on the rise. Nor was the Mount Vernon neighborhood, which had once been among the city’s most exclusive enclaves, immune from the problem. Tourists, students, and suburbanites—drawn to the area by attractions such as the famous Peabody Conservatory of Music—were often targeted for robbery or worse.

  No wonder the officers did not seem particularly concerned about the meek and skittish man they found at the library. Well-dressed, polite, and obviously humiliated, he looked about as much like a menace to society as the Peabody Library looked like a crack house. And after all, what had he allegedly done? Taken a few pages out of a book? Stolen four sheets of paper? There were dangerous people out there—crazy, desperate, dangerous people with guns. This poor guy hardly seemed worth the bother.

  But if the police had their own reasons for letting the matter slide, they also had some very practical concerns about how the case would play out, especially given that the suspect lived out of state and might skip out on his bail, with little practical possibility of extradition. “We were advised by the city officers who came that, with this kind of crime, we were running the risk that, if we placed charges, he would make bail and never show up [for trial] and we would get no recompense of any kind,” Dennis O’Shea, a Johns Hopkins spokesman, later explained.4

  Wouldn’t accepting the money in lieu of Bland’s immediate arrest be easier for everyone involved? The library would get its book repaired; the crook would learn a frightening and costly lesson; the police would have that much less paperwork, that much more time to focus on real criminals. For their part, library officials thought the idea was at least worth considering. They telephoned a lawyer and mulled over their options, Gilbert Bland’s fate still blowing in the wind.

  THAT TO DO ABOUT BLAND WAS JUST THE LATEST IN A series of difficult decisions that those who ran the Peabody had been forced to make in recent years. For the better part of this century, things at the library had been headed pretty steadily downhill. By 1910 the Peabody Institute was devoting more and more funds to its famous music conservatory, fewer and fewer to the collection. By 1940 new book buying had petered out almost entirely. By 1960 the library—full of dusty old books that no one could check out—had fallen into an alarming state of neglect. “Basically, nobody was using it,” explained Cynthia Requardt, curator of special collections at Johns Hopkins University’s Milton S. Eisenhower Library. Worse yet, the Peabody Institute no longer had the funds to adequately maintain the beautiful old building.

  Cutting its losses, the Institute’s board of trustees voted in 1966 to hand the Peabody over to Baltimore’s public library system. It turned out to be an ill-suited marriage, one that the library barely survived intact. Shortly after the merger city officials gave serious thought to auctioning off the library’s most valuable books, shuffling the rest into the public system, and converting the building into a study hall for high school students. If this caused a furious commotion inside the late Mr. Peabody’s grave, it also triggered an uproar in the local academic community, and the scheme was duly abandoned. In the 1970s a fund-raising effort enabled the library to patch the building up a bit, install air-conditioning, and rebind a few hundred books. But as the city’s budget tightened bureaucrats decided they could no longer justify the expense of the facility. In 1982 they turned it over to the special collections division at Johns Hopkins University.

  This proved to be a much better match in terms of overall philosophy—but the library’s financial troubles remained. The university reported that it was pumping between three and four hundred thousand dollars into the facility each year—and even that was not enough. Among other problems, the roof, with its hard-to-repair skylight, was leaking. “The [Grand Stack Room] was opened in 1878 and I’m not sure if the roof had ever been replaced,” said Requardt, the Hopkins official who now oversees the Peabody.

  To librarians a leaky roof is no small problem. Moisture is the enemy; it causes dampstaining, foxing, and mildew, all of which can stain and destroy paper and some of which are contagious, infecting nearby books with their harmful spores. It takes a lot of effort to defend against these foes, and a lot of money. The temperature and humidity must be precisely con-trolled—not an easy thing to do in balmy Baltimore, not with a leaky roof, and especially not in a place like the Peabody Library. “It’s just an incredibly expensive building to run,” explained Requardt. “It’s a nineteenth-century building that’s on the National Register of Historic Places, so there are certain restraints on what you can and cannot do.”

  By 1989 the building and the books were at such risk that university officials decided something drastic had to be done. They opted for an approach so controversial it is known in some quarters simply as the “D-word.” That stands for deaccessioning, and if you are baffled by the euphemism, think uncollecting or anti-obtaining or conserving in reverse. Put simply, Hopkins was planning to sell rare books in order to save rare books. University officials announced that Sotheby’s in New York would be auctioning off ten of the Peabody’s books, consisting of sixty-seven volumes, as part of an effort to raise at least $2 million toward a $4 million endowment fund for the library. Included in that group were two copies of Hartmann Schedel’s 1493 Nuremberg Chronicle, which contains one of the most important early printed maps of the world, as well as works by the photographer Edward Curtis and the nature artists John James Audubon, Mark Catesby, and John Gould.

  Hopkins officials insisted they had no choice: the very future of the Peabody Library was at stake. “Our goal is to try to find ways to preserve [the library],” the university provost, John Lombardi, told the Baltimore Sun.5 He claimed the sale would maintain the library “with a minimum amount of change and a maximum amount of preservation and access.” Officials also were quick to point out that all the books to be sold were duplicated in other Hopkins collections. Nonetheless, the announcement touched off a firestorm of criticism, typified by the blunt words of John Burgan, chief librarian at the public library in Hartford, Connecticut: “It borders on the rape of a great library collection.”

  To Burgan and other foes of the move, deaccessioning in order to preserve the library was like burning clapboards in order to warm a house. “The Peabody Library is one of the great treasures of the United States, and once you sell off the rare books you might as well close the library, because that’s the uniqueness of it,” declared Regina Soria, professor emeritus of modern languages at the College of Notre Dame.

  But deaccessioning accounted for only part of the furor. Other museums and libraries had sold off some of their collections to make ends meet; in many people’s minds the practice was ugly and unfortunate, but perhaps not unforgivable. No, what critics really found offensive was that Hopkins planned not just to sell historic old volumes but to cut them up beforehand. That’s right: book breaking—not by some profit-obsessed dealer but by one of the oldest and most respected libraries in the United States. One of the books scheduled to go un
der the knife was Audubon’s Birds of America. The Peabody’s copy was extremely rare—one of only two in the world that contained Audubon’s signature on all four volumes. Nonetheless, Hopkins and Sotheby’s planned to gut the four-volume set so that its 435 prints could be sold separately. “That’s disgraceful,” Arthur Gutman, a member of the Johns Hopkins University Library Advisory Council, told the Sun. “It ought to be sold, if it has to be sold, to a sister institution, and not broken up.”

  Despite all objections, the sale went forward, raising a total of $2.4 million and allowing Hopkins to keep the building and the collection open to the public. One print alone, “American Flamingo” from Birds of America, fetched $66,550—a record at the time for a single Audubon. The buyer was a fellow named Graham Arader.

  But while such head-snapping sums were a godsend for the Peabody in the short run—enabling Hopkins to pay for everything from staff salaries to upkeep of the physical plant—they posed a serious long-term threat to libraries across the country, which faced increasingly tough security concerns as the value of their collections skyrocketed. The Peabody itself had been saved, but its once stellar reputation had been noticeably damaged.

  Now, as they questioned Gilbert Bland, Peabody officials faced yet another tough choice. Had they been aware that their decision would touch off another controversy, they would undoubtedly have given it more thought. But they had no notion of what—and whom—they were dealing with. “Frankly, my sense of it was that we had caught a bumbling, stumbling amateur,” said Frederick DeKuyper, associate general counsel for Johns Hopkins University, whom Peabody officials consulted in the immediate aftermath of Bland’s detention. “None of us at the time knew of his past activities.”

  After conferring with security officials, DeKuyper signed off on a plan to forgo Bland’s arrest in return for seven hundred dollars in damages. The suspect, who was reportedly carrying large amounts of cash, was more than happy with the deal. With the gods apparently smiling down upon him once again, he fled the library in a hurry—too much of a hurry, as it turned out.

  HERE’S THE THING ABOUT THE HARPIES: THEY SCREW with your head. Known by ancients as the Snatchers because they loved to steal children, souls, and other precious things, they were brilliant at torturing their victims. When Zeus condemned the soothsayer Phineus to everlasting hunger, it was the Harpies who served as enforcers. Each time Phineus attempted to eat, the Harpies would swoop in, stealing his food or fouling it with excrement just as he was about to put it in his mouth.

  And now—just as Gilbert Bland was so close to freedom that he, too, could practically taste it—a similar fate befell our hero. Was it the Harpies who placed that notebook out of his mind and out of his reach as he left the Peabody Library? If so, it would be perfectly in keeping with their traditional role as tormentors of those with wicked obsessions. No matter: whether by intervention of the gods or simple forgetfulness, the fateful fact remains that Bland left his notebook behind. Within minutes of the thief’s departure, the Peabody’s security chief, Donald Pfouts, noticed the book and decided to give it a closer examination. He quickly made a discovery that would send shock waves through libraries all over America.

  TO ILLUSTRATE THE SECURITY CHALLENGES FACED BY INstitutions such as the Peabody Library, let us briefly return to Baltimore’s Washington Monument, that “towering mainmast,” which Bland had passed under during his unsuccessful escape attempt. Completed in 1829, the monument is the nation’s oldest public memorial to George Washington, and it holds a central place in the city’s history. In the words of one tourist brochure, “It put Baltimore on the world map.”6 Experts still consider the design by the architect Robert Mills to be one of the nation’s foremost examples of Romantic neoclassicism—but average people are passionate about it, too. When it needed repairs in the 1980s, and the cash-strapped city ran out of money to do the job right, a group of business leaders stepped in, declaring the monument a “national treasure.”7

  Now let us consider a different national treasure, this one also the work of Robert Mills. I am not referring to his other Washington Monument, the famous one in the nation’s capital, or to his Treasury Building, the famous one on the back of a ten-dollar bill. I am referring to his Atlas of the State of South Carolina. It turns out that, in addition to being a noted architect, Mills was an important mapmaker. His 1825 masterpiece was not only a beautiful piece of art in its own right but a work of real historical importance—the first state atlas ever produced in the United States. Yet all national treasures are not the same. We can be sure that if the monument were defaced, there would be a public outcry. But few people would complain if someone desecrated a copy of the Atlas of the State of South Carolina. It’s a pretty fair bet, in fact, that no one would even notice the crime had taken place.

  But if the public at large knows virtually nothing—and cares even less—about the Atlas of the State of South Carolina, a small number of map collectors and dealers value it a great deal. Today a copy of the atlas in excellent condition might sell for upwards of $30,000. A single map of Charleston County from the atlas might fetch $2,000 or more. And, unfortunately, what collectors and dealers are willing to pay for, thieves are willing to steal.

  So it was that, as he flipped through Gilbert Bland’s notebook, Donald Pfouts came across the following passage:

  For MD Dealer

  Currier & Ives (90%)

  Kellogg

  Haskell & Allen

  Baillie

  Mills County Atlas of S.C.

  Pfouts could not help but recognize the disturbing implications of such words. Almost every page was filled with lists, most of which contained the names of cartographers and the titles of specific maps (and a few of which, such as the preceding example, also included the names of artists and their prints). Next to many of these entries were prices. Pfouts quickly came to a startling conclusion: the notebook was essentially a hit list. Worse yet, there was ample evidence that, far from being an isolated incident, as library officials had assumed, Bland’s visit to the Peabody was part of something much bigger. The book contained the names—and, in some cases, addresses—of other libraries where specific maps could be found. Moreover, folded into its pages were informational materials from institutions such as the University of Virginia’s Alderman Library, a disturbing clue that other thefts may have already taken place. Then there were those ominous words “For MD Dealer”—a possible implication that the manuscripts were stolen on commission. And, finally, there were a number of potentially incriminating notes, which Bland had apparently written to himself or perhaps passed to an unknown accomplice. They strongly hinted that the intruder was a man on a mission, operating in a highly organized and deliberate fashion. “Can’t these people leave? I can’t do it now. OK now,” read one of the neatly written passages. “These 2 are done now. Thank God!” read another. “Yes she’s really slowing me down! Fat Bitch,” read a third. And a final one: “The Bowen Atlas—of all the bad luck—What is going on here. Am I not going to get these Bowens? What [will] become of me?”

  It was a question that was beginning to interest Peabody librarians a great deal—especially after they went back through their own records and discovered that more maps were missing from other texts that Bland had allegedly handled, during both this visit and one the previous September. Did he get his Bowens? Apparently so. Four plates were missing from the now decidedly incomplete Complete Atlas or Distinct View of the Known World by the eighteenth-century cartographer Emanuel Bowen, along with material from works by Mathew Carey, Jacques Nicolas Bellin, Entick, and Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix. In all, twenty-seven plates were missing from the Peabody alone. Had other institutions suffered similar losses? It was now becoming frighteningly clear to Hopkins officials that they might be dealing with a crime spree. Cynthia Requardt—who had not been in on the decision to free Bland—quickly began calling the libraries that appeared to have been targeted in the notebook. Then she went to her computer an
d sent out a message over ExLibris, an electronic discussion group for those interested in rare books and special collections:

  On December 7, Gilbert Joseph Bland, Jr., was apprehended removing maps from eighteenth century books at the George Peabody Library of The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.8

  Bland was using the alias James Perry. He is a white male, 46 years of age, 5’ 9 or 10”, with light brown hair (receding) and a light brown moustache. A photograph is available.

  When apprehended, Bland presented a Florida driver’s license. In lieu of pressing charges, the library accepted payment for damages, and Bland was released. Since his release, we have reason to believe that Bland has visited other research libraries in the mid-Atlantic region.

  For Requardt, Pfouts, and other Hopkins officials, there was little to do but wait—and hope that their worst fears would not be realized.

  CHAPTER 5

  How to Make a Map,